The Tulse Luper Suitcase: an interview with DP Rainier van Brummelen

The Tulse Luper Suitcase may well be Peter Greenaway’s most ambitious project to date, a sprawling multimedia enterprise which includes three movies, a TV series, a DVD and hundreds of hours of content for Internet distribution.

The shoot also involves a truly globe-spanning number of locations, including Spain, Luxembourg, Wales, Hungary, Hong Kong, Japan, Germany and Italy.

Rainier van Brummelen, who also served as cinematographer on Greenaway’s last film, knew that The Tulse Luper Suitcase would require fresh thinking. “The project fits very nicely with us shooting HD,” he explains. “Greenaway says there no future for film and this is a radically new project.”

Van Brummelen chose to shoot with CineAlta in consultation with the project’s producer and Greenaway. “One of the big reasons for choosing HD is that the whole movie is one big composite. There’s not a single scene where no composite is done, it’s the language of the movie. It’s about pictures in pictures.”

HD Collages

Aside from the HDW-F900 CineAlta camera, additional material is being shot using nine DSR-PD150 DVCAM camcorders, hired through Amsterdam facility Cam-A-Lot.

A central motif is the interaction of multiple images on the screen. “Just as the artist David Hockney has created collages of photographs of a scene taken at slightly different angles or at different timeframes, Greenaway intends to show multi layers on the screen” van Brummelen says. The main image will be the CineAlta shots, but there will also be as many as nine separate DVCAM images playing at the same time.

For example, there’s a scene in South Wales, where some boys run across nine gardens. “If we have nine cameras in a row at the top of the screen we can see the nine gardens at the same time,” he says

The need for so much post production work meant it was impractical to shoot on film. “Also with HD, is the cost. We imagine the whole movie will need digital treatment, if everything needs to be scanned the whole thing would be very expensive. In this sense, for this movie we’re able to be really a lot cheaper.”

A flexible religion

Creatively, the CineAlta camera allows Greenaway and van Brummelen a lot more flexibility on set. “Normally, cinema is based on people needing lots of control. Every moment of the job needs to be controlled, which in a cost sense is very good, but it can be quite restrictive and it can be more and more difficult to adjust to real life – to what actually happens when you’re on set and, say the sun doesn’t come out and the script says the sun should be out.

“We try to shift this idea of control and to shift you sometimes have to exaggerate. So we’ve made a religion out of being flexible and in that way solving problems.”

The HD monitor helps. ”Peter if he looks at the monitor and likes what he sees, will say let’s do that shot, even if you were only zooming out to get an alignment or something. The whole process becomes much more involved for everyone and it allows you to be more organic. We also make more interesting images.”

Van Brummelen insists that shooting on CineAlta does not mean a compromise in image quality.

Greenaway adds: “What we’re doing is very experimental in some ways - and there is a full understanding that nowadays the editor, not the cameraman, is king. Everything can be rearranged by the editor – he or she is all-powerful.

“But you need to continually reinvent the medium of the moving image, and it is fascinating to try to put every aspect of the new visual possibilities into one major work – to provide, if only at first primarily for oneself, a bench-mark product, to use the information age technology not just for storing and retreiving and collating information but for creating a new aesthetic world – with new rules and new syntax – the model without apology in Joyce's Ulysses – a product where the language itself had to radically change and be re-invented to accommodate the meaning."